Portrait of Porto

So here we are..sitting in a laundromat in the ancient town of Porto in the country of Portugal attempting to remedy the aromatic impact of infused body odurs in reusable body coverings.

Nicely quiet (after some helpful guidance from some yanks - who'd obviously since left )  the clothes performed their merry dance enabling some reflection time....
Porto is a town perched on steep hills divided by a large river. Huge bridges span the chasm below, the most spectacular has two layers with the top one carrying trains and foot traffic, cars have to go down below or use another of the more modern looking cross ways.
The river is huge.

Capable of carrying long accommodation cruise boats. Apparently it starts in the mountains of Spain and feeds the north of the nation on it's million meter journey to where we were yesterday. There is no estuary (as such). It carves its way through the steep hills and ploughs straight into the ocean. Coming from a flat  wide brown land this does not seem to make geological sense as there should be flat deltas, flood plains etc. before the confluence of the waters. Hopefully this will become clearer in the following days or this observation riddled overly verbose driven blogger will remain perplexed until leaving this mortal coil (unfortunately for you dear blogger the clothes keep spinning and so the words keep flowing...).
The centre of town is typical olde worlde   - strewn with old buildings standing up to the ravages of time by being well built in the first place (stone on stone as compared to steel in concrete ), connected by nonsensical roads/alleys paved with lumpy cobblestones and traversed by milling throngs of tourists who are the obvious cornerstone of the economy these days.

It's a bit hard to visually differentiate the locals from the visitors, although one seemingly obvious sign is the width of them. If the towns original designers could've seen into the future they may have made the footpaths wider to accommodate.
The locals we do meet are fabulous, friendly and happy to help. Apparently they're all a bit tired and grumpy at the end of summer and they can't be blamed for that given the rudeness of some of the visitors. We're here at the beginning of the annual swarm and therefore all good in that respect.
The up and down of the steep roads is putting a fair amount of strain on the legs. This is not a place for wheelchairs - especially at the moment with major works disrupting all the flows in the centre of town. There are no skateboards. There are some push bikes, mostly riding dangerously by locals weaving around the visitors or showing off by doing it on one wheel. The one visitor group we saw on ebikes showed the precariousness of the place when one inadvertently left their mount when stopping in a crowd.
Ottoman era mosaics adorn many of the 3 story old concrete/stone buildings that define the streets. Cars whizz around constantly. And of course there are the people. There are always the people. Many languages, dialects, men yelling stuff they are selling in some of them , others quietly pushing their wares surreptitiously in your ears as they go past. Beggars on the sides of the cobblestone lined footpaths seems to be a thing all progressive empathetic societies need to deal with.
And so that's it...washing done, machines now quiet. Back the unfolding story....